DreamHost’s 10 Years Birthday is approaching and traditionally this has been celebrated with a fantastic birthday promo for new customers. Many of you will remember the crazy 777 promo for DreamHost’s 7th birthday, which gave 1 year of hosting for 77 cents/month, the 8-year birthday which gave unlimited domains to everybody and 80% off new accounts and last year birthday where everybody got double the amount of bandwidth, ten times the amount of disk space and new customers could get $99.99 off.

Rumours I’ve got from reliable sources tells that this year DreamHost will offer a special birthday plan with more storage and bandwidth than the Strictly Business plan, but cheaper then the Crazy Domain Insane plan!

Now, you can get exactly the same sort of memory and cpu isolation you’re used to from DreamHost PS for your MySQL databases as well!

DreamHost PS MySQL is completely separate from DreamHost PS; you can get either one without the other, neither or both!

For MySQL, CPU time is much less important than RAM and disk speed (MySQL PS uses local, raided, high-speed SAS drives). Since it is not a potential bottleneck, on MySQL PS CPU time is approximate… though still proportional to your RAM level.

If you get both DreamHost PS for your web server and for your MySQL, you get 20% off your combined monthly DreamHost PS fees!

Prices are the same as for the web server: From 150 MHz CPU and 150 MB RAM for $15/month to 2300 MHz CPU and 2300 MB RAM for $230/month (but you get 20% off if you get both the PS web server and the PS MySQL server).

Since the network problems at DreamHost continues and the status site is acting up again, I’m relaying the latest message from DreamHost Status here:

Unfortunately we are experiencing a return of similar network problems that we experienced yesterday. Please keep your eye on this post as we will update it as soon as we have more information. Sorry for the inconvenience.

UPDATE
The problem has been tracked down to a naughty switch and has been resolved. Due to the amount of traffic that dreamhoststatus.com is getting, we are leaving it static for the time being. If you are still experiencing problems, please contact support.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE
Thu Aug 16 16:38:09 PDT 2007
Shortly after the last update, things went down hill again. It turns out the switch wasn’t the problem. For the time being, everything is back up and running and the problem appears to be fixed. Continue to check this space for updates and as always.

Thu Aug 16 16:51:46 PDT 2007
While the networking issues appear to be gone, we are still dealing with fallout from them. This includes a few non-responsive caching DNS servers causing more slow down. We are bringing these back up now and everything should be smooth again soon

Thu Aug 16 20:28:38 PDT 2007
DNS is back up and running. Everything appears to be working fine. We will keep monitoring this issue throughout the night to catch any problems that may arise. If you have any problems whatsoever, please contact support.

DreamHost PS is a premium shared hosting service based on Linux-VServer, which gives each user their own “virtual machine” and thereby protecting their CPU and RAM from other users on the same physical machine.

While virtual servers gets more and more common in the hosting business, I belive the pricing model is pretty unique.

The price is currently $1.00/month for each 10 MB RAM and 10 MhZ CPU.

You choose your guaranteed server resources and can readjust whenever you want (you don’t even need to reboot the server).

You can still burst up to the full 2.3 GHz CPU and double the memory. This means that you can start out small and scale as you go.

A year ago DreamHost was going through some rough times with a saturated network and multiple power failures. To cheer people up I posted the Top 10 Worst Domain Names which features some of the worst domain names found on the internet. Some of them are obvious fake, but fun nevertheless.

Since then the visitors have kept on coming. The Top 10 Worst Domain Names has been read by more than 60.000 people and the 20 More Unfortunate Domain Names has had more than 35.000 visitors. The two articles are by far the most popular content on this blog (quite sad really), so maybe I should change its name to the Unofficial Worst Domains Blog?

The interesting thing, DreamHost wise, is that one of their writers, Clint Ecker, tells how he temporarily uploaded the video to his own DreamHost account, but forgot to update the link before publishing the post on Ars Technica. Within two days nearly 6000 people had watched the video and consequently eaten up 471 GB of bandwidth.

It’s nice to see that DreamHost can serve nearly half a terabyte of video for one of the busiest blogs in the world without a hiccup. I think the people who claim that DreamHost would never actual honor their generous storage and bandwidth limits are proven wrong hereby.